Bill USA
Bill USA's JournalStanford scientists develop a process & catalyst for making ethanol from Carbon monoxide & water
http://rt.com/usa/stanford-study-copper-ethanol-728/"We have discovered the first metal catalyst that can produce appreciable amounts of ethanol from carbon monoxide at room temperature and pressure – a notoriously difficult electrochemical reaction," wrote Stanford’s Matthew Kanan, a co-author of the report released this week.
The scientists say that they are still a ways from developing said prototype, but believe they are on the right track towards achieving a goal that has the potential of providing people with a new, less-costly biofuel that could essentially revamp the energy industry.
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...the researchers say that biofuel would be generated by using a state-of-the-art device still in development that uses two electrodes, including one made of an "oxide-derived copper," to convert it into fuel.
The Revenge Of Mitch McConnell: GOP Senate Will Halt Obama Nominations: What to expect if Dems don't
... get out the vote (i.e. not one Democrat stays home on election day).
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/republican-senate-obama-legacy
If Republicans win control of the Senate next week, as many expect, they will gain a powerful weapon to reshape President Barack Obama's legacy in his final two years: the authority to block his nominations.
Under a Democratic-led Senate, Obama has enjoyed remarkable success in confirming his executive appointees and remaking the federal courts in his image.
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That streak could screech to a halt if Republicans win the net six seats needed to take the Senate come January. In that scenario, probable Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) could prevent any nomination from coming up in committee, and probable Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) could block anyone from receiving a full Senate vote.
"My guess is Obama would have to present nominees that are much much more acceptable to Republicans, or they won't even schedule hearings," Barnett said.
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M$M celebrating their party's taking control of Senate. 'Great achievement' of campaign of Nothing
The GOP public relations arm, the Corporate M$M has been celebrating the last couple of weeks the takeover of the Senate. They are quite confident in voter apathy as we march Democracy to the showers.
But I think it's time ...
[font size="4"] President Obama should make a statement explaining to voters what that the GOP's Campaign offering Nothing is all about.[/font]
The GOP plan to repeal Obamacare .. a Healthcare law modelled after a Republican healthcare plan: Romneycare.
The Idea of the individual mandate was a Republican idea first proposed in the Clinton administration as an alternative to the Single Payer system most Democrats were for.
And this is what the GOP says is so 'intolerable'. I guess they want to go back to a system of the most expensive health care in the world (with the pre-existing conditions trap door) which had a tendency to disappear just when you needed it.
What the GOP mean by "less Government" in your lives
"Less Government" means more deregulation and more tax cuts for the wealthy further aggrandizing the already economy-sickening wealth concentration problem which lead to the Trickle Down Deregulation disaster of 2008.
The GOP, he should tell voters, criticize the performance of the recovery (from the economic disaster they created) while the M$M has not bothered to tell viewers that the GOP set records filibustering every stimulus and jobs bill proposed by the Dems. Ever since President Obama took office the word "filibuster" is verboten on M$M tv.
____ The original Stimulus bill (ARRA) did receive - three Republican votes - but only after the bill was weakened by about a third by converting government spending into tax cuts. The GOP demanded this as the price of their votes to pass the ARRA - and when this was added - they didn't vote for it anyway (except for the three who broke ranks and voted for the country). The GOP demanded he convert government spending to tax cuts because they knew that when you are sliding into a depression and everybody is wondering if they will have a job in six months - that tax cuts WILL NOT LEAD TO SPENDING - BECAUSE PEOPLE WILL SAVE ANY TAX CUT OR USE IT TO PAY DOWN DEBT. Which is exactly what most people did. Thus the original stimulus was downsized by a third.
GOP Improvised Economic Disasters - Government shutdown and threats of government default on its debt
The repetitive threats and then the actual shutdown of the Government and the threat to cause a default on the U.S. debt caused businesses to become extremely wary of hiring back FULL TIME PERMANENT workers. Businesses have been sitting on huge cash hoards over the last few years. Now, businesses don 't like keeping mountains of cash. It doesn't make much money for them and they would rather be putting that money into their busineses - as in hiringmore people. But WITH THE GOP THREATENING GOVERNMENT CLOSURES AND DEFAULT ON THE DEBT - the businesses weren't about to hire back full time people - just to lay them off a few months later. That costs businesses money.
As the GOP like to say: "businesses don't like uncertainty". You got that right. And the uncertainty cast over the recovery by continued threats to the economy really scares business. So, given the reckless behavior of the GOP the businesses were playing it safe and hired fewer than they would have (2011 - 2013). This of course slowed the recovery and with less hiring slowed the recovery of wages - making many people wonder "what recovery?". Tell them that Mr. President.
More on "less government"
The GOP are 'hot' to privatize social security. GOP friends on Wall Street have been salivating over all that money for decades. A great idea - have everybody's safety-net invested in the stock market then the next Trickle Down disaster will be even worse!
Mr. President, challenge the GOP to tell people what their Nihilist Campaign of Nothing is all about - and then go ahead and tell people what they plan to do to America. Let the GOP deny it. Make your points now - just before people go to vote.
Mr. President, Democrats would like to see you are willing to fight for what's right.
First Industrial-scale Municipal Solid Waste to Biofuel Facility Opens
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/06/09/first-industrial-scale-municipal-solid-waste-biofuel/The first industrial-scale municipal solid waste to biofuel facility opened in Edmonton on June 4, 2014. Enerkem’s waste-to-biofuels and chemicals facility will convert 100,000 tonnes of sorted municipal waste per year into biofuels and chemicals. Once the facility is up to full capacity in 2016, the city will be able to divert 90% of its residential waste from landfills.
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Edmonton will produce 38 million litres of clean fuels and biochemicals from waste that used to end up in landfills, which will initially be used to produce methanol. The facility will eventually produce enough ethanol to fill the tanks of 400,000 cars with a 5% (E5) blend.
“We believe that this game-changing facility, built in partnership with the City of Edmonton, can become a model for many communities around the world that are looking for a sustainable way to manage waste,” said Vincent Chornet, President and CEO of Enerkem.
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Chornet said, “We break down the waste using heat and convert it into a gas that is as clean as natural gas. Then we convert the gas to liquid methanol — and all that happens in three minutes.”
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Two Organizations Call Out th EPA on Corn Ethanol Emissions Modeling, 'Seriously Flawed' (i.e BOGUS)
http://www.torquenews.com/1080/two-organizations-call-out-epa-corn-ethanol-emissions-modeling-seriously-flawedThe Urban Air Initiative (UAI) and the Energy Future Coalition (EFC) are questioning the Environmental Protection Agency's MOVES (motor vehicle emissions simulator) modeling system for estimating the emissions from mobile sources. Calling the methodology "seriously flawed," the groups are calling for peer review of the models, especially as they treat higher ethanol blends.
The EPA's Office of Transportation and Air Quality (OTAQ) developed the MOVES report to estimate the emissions for mobile sources at the national, county, and project level for specific pollutants. These include air toxins, greenhouse gases, and others. The latest report is MOVES2014, which includes the effect of Tier 3 rule and the impacts of other EPA rules promulgated since the last report, MOVES2010.
The trouble is, the MOVES report is not peer reviewed, but is still a go-to source for policy makers. UAI and EFC note that MOVES2014 will be used to estimate air pollution emissions from cars, trucks, motorcycles, and buses in official State Implementation Plan (SIP) submissions to EPA. The EPA has advised states to use MOVES2014 in SIP development as expeditiously as possible. A letter from the two organizations to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy calls for the agency to suspend the use of MOVES model with respect to ethanol blends until the EPAct study that it's based upon can be peer reviewed by transportation fuels experts at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and National Renewable Energy Laboratory. After the peer review, they further request analysis evaluation to maximize the accuracy of the EPA's modeling.
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The groups' primary concern is that the EPA's study used match-blending ethanol in its study whereas the majority of the ethanol fuels sold in the U.S. are splash-blended. The difference is not insignificant. Products like E10 and E15 are splash blended (meaning the ethanol is poured into standard petroleum fuel and mixed). The fuels the EPA tested were match-blended, a method by which gasoline blendstock is adjusted to match certain selected parameters (by adding , usually to maximize octane ratings. This second method is more expensive and is not normally used in consumer fuels.
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click here to see letter
excerpt from letter:
(emphasis my own)
The study concluded that “other factors being equal, increasing ethanol is associated with an increase in emissions”3 – but it later acknowledged: “However, if typical collateral fuel changes (lower T50 and aromatics) are accounted for, we might project that blending ethanol would tend to reduce THC, NMHC and NMOG emissions (highlighting the important sensitivities to these other fuel parameters).”4 (Emphasis added.)
... Environmental Protection courtesy of Exxon - Mobil et al!!
- See more at: http://www.torquenews.com/1080/two-organizations-call-out-epa-corn-ethanol-emissions-modeling-seriously-flawed#sthash.ptAsClxR.dpuf
Pump the Movie -- Pricking Petro-Nonsense - Carl Pope in HuffPo
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carl-pope/pump-the-movie---pricking_b_5831164.htmlIt's about time that someone pricked the fraudulent "Saudi America" narrative that the oil industry and its allies have been peddling successfully to the media for the past several years -- and a new movie Pump the Movie does exactly that. According to the current petro-fantasy, a domestically significant, but globally marginal, increase in US production of light-tight oil means the end to concerns about over-reliance on petroleum, the return of affordable prices at the pump, even a world-wide glut of oil. Happy days are here again, thanks to the US oil boom, we read in the New York Times and even in the once numerate Wall Street Journal.
Tell it to ISIS making a fortune on a trivial amount of black-market oil production it controls. Tell it to Vladimir Putin, who is staring down the European Union from his perch as Europe's primary provider of $100 oil. Or, as The Pump points out, tell it to US drivers who are still paying over $3/gallon for gas. Only a few years ago the idea of oil at $100 was terrifying. Now the oil industry is well down the road toward selling us on the idea that it is unavoidable -- indeed that we should be looking forward to oil at $120 or higher.
[font size="+1"]The movie, produced by the Fuels Freedom Foundation, puts today's global oil landscape in the proper historic perspective, tracing how oil's current monopoly as a transportation fuel emerged. First came John D. Rockefeller's successful efforts to leverage prohibition to kill off Henry Ford's plan to rely on alcohol as the primary driver of the automotive revolution. In the '30s General Motors conspired with Chevron, Firestone and Mack Truck to shut down America's streetcar system. The recent assault on ethanol as a fuel was, similarly, funded and managed by the oil industry and its hired guns.
Pump next takes us on a survey of the fuels that ought to be competing with oil for our transportation dollar -- because they all cost less than gasoline or diesel -- electric vehicles, natural gas fuels, or biofuels derived from agricultural or municipal wastes or dedicated crops. [font style="background: #ffffaa;"]It argues that a huge portion of today's cars could actually operate on ethanol or methanol derived from natural gas or biomass with truly trivial software and fuel line modifications, while fleet turnover will more slowly take us to a largely electric vehicle future.[/font] It uses Brazil as a powerful counter-narrative, a country that did break oil's monopoly at its pumps, and convincingly argues that the alternatives to oil are both better and cheaper -- if they could get into the market.[/font]
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Carl Pope is the former executive director and chairman of the Sierra Club
in interview of Pres. Obama, Steve Kroft goes for punk journalism. His GOP handlers will be pleased.
On '60 Minutes' on Sunday, Steve Kroft interviewed President Obama and he couldn't pass up the opportunity to win BJ points with the GOP by going 'punk' on the President.
Steve asked about the coming mid-term elections by starting with "do you think you're going to get shellacked?"
Before the President could say anything Kroft had another question - or two - for him:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/president-obama-60-minutes/
[font color="blue"]{Oh how chummie, and impolite. steve can't wait for an answer to one question before jumping onto the next one. Gosh, do you think he's really interested in the PResident's answers?_B_USA}[/font]
President Obama: Here's what I'm going to tell the American people. When I came into office, our economy was in crisis. We had unemployment up at 10 percent. It's now down to 6.1. We've had the longest run of uninterrupted private sector job growth in our history. We have seen deficits cut by more than half. Corporate balance sheets are probably the best they've been in the last several decades. We are producing more energy than we had before. We are producing more clean energy than we ever had before. I can put my record against any leader around the world in terms of digging ourselves out of a terrible, almost unprecedented financial crisis. Ronald Reagan used to ask the question, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" In this case, are you better off than you were in six? And the answer is, the country is definitely better off than we were when I came into office, but now we have to make...
Kroft needled the President about whether of not the Democrats can hold the Senate. Then he actually went back to ISSUES concerning the American people. But he still couldn't give up the punk journalism.
Steve Kroft: You think you can convince people that they're doing fine, economically?
This is actually a proposition within a question. He's saying the President is trying to tell people they are "doing fine"... in other words - have no reason to expect better economic conditions. THat's NOT what President Obama said and that's not what the President is saying to people. But, President Obama seemed to be prepared for hostile questioning from one of the Corporate media GOP toadies. The President had a succinct, grown-up response for Stevie..
President Obama: Hopefully, they get a chance to hear the argument, because all I'm doing is presenting the facts.
That is, if the Corporate media break from the tradition of only providing 'news' that's been approved by their GOP handlers and start relating the facts to people. Then the Democrats will do okay.
but that's not likely now. They've 'protected' the people from the fact that the GOP have set records for filibustering everything the President and the Democrats have proposed to repair and rebuild the economy from the Trickle Down - Deregulation disaster (what % of the people know about this ...7%, 3%?). Since Obama was elected to office the word "filibuster" is verboten on M$M. How many times have you even heard the word since Obama was elected on M$M - even though the GOP has set RECORDS for filibustering? That's M$M, always happy to keep servicing the GOP.
Meanwhile I have heard a couple dozen discussions about President Obama's "leadership" all over M$M. However the Corporate Lobbyist Party does in November, they owe a debt of gratitude to the television networks for helping sell the GOP anti-Obama propaganda on every issue the GOP has been opposed to solving - oh, which is EVERY ISSUE we are faced with.
Corporate tv has been providing hundreds of millions of $s in free propaganda to the GOP. Too bad THAT is NOT taken into account by those tracking the spending on political ads.
IF you think Kroft's performance was offensive, unprofessional, not really intended to provide the viewers with greater understanding of the issues or President Obama's view of them, go to Steve Kroft's interview of President Obama page and let them know what you think (I did)..
.... BTW, if we don't register our criticism of - and disgust at M$M's practice of doing the GOP's bidding, it will only get worse and further confuse those who get most of their 'news' from the M$M.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/president-obama-60-minutes/
is Talking Points Memo basically a dead website? Everytime i go there the page just freezes.
Eventually I get a message from browser asking if I want to kill a script that keeps on running. I can check "yes" but it doesn't seem to do any good. My computer slows & virtually locks up. Once I kill the link to TPM it get's going again.
What's going on? Can anybody make that site work anymore?
Corn priced at $3.46 a bushel. Ethanol production 3.5% aheadof 2013, estimate 14.1 biln gal for 2014
http://www.quotecorn.com/Since Aug 1999 the World Bank's Food Commodities Index has increased 117%. The price of corn over that period has increased 111%. The price of Crude Oil over that period has increased 421%.
[font size="4"]You would need 26 million Priuses to achieve Ethanol’s current GHG emissions reduction[/font]
Ethanol currently represents approximately 10% of our light vehicle fuel supply. With GHG reductions of 34% (Argonne National Laboratory - 2012) Ethanol, at ~10% of the fuel supply, in total produces a 3.38% reduction in the GHG emissions of the entire Light Vehicle fleet.
..... So how many Toyota Priuses would it take to achieve that much of a GHG emissions reduction? We must convert the 3.38% GHG emissions to an equivalent number of cars and light trucks. To do this we apply Ethanol’s aggregate GHG emissions reduction (i.e. as a percentage of the GHG emissions for the entire fleet) to the total number of vehicles comprising the entire fleet of automobiles and light trucks, or 250 million vehicles. Thus, 3.38% of 250 million vehicles would be approximately 8.4 million vehicles.
.... Since the Prius reduces gasoline consumption about 32.6% compared to a Toyota Corolla (a vehicle of comparable weight and payload), dividing 8.4 million vehicles by .326 gives you slightly more than 25.7 million Priuses which would be required to produce the same amount of GHG emissions reduction as Ethanol currently does, for the entire light vehicle fleet.
SOMEBODY ONCE SAID:
[font size="4"]... "You can replace the fuel cars burn faster than you can replace the cars that burn the fuel."[/font]
40% of the food in the United States is wasted, uneaten, rotting in landfills or scrapped/wasted b4
it gets to the final consumer. .. Natural Resources Defense Council.
http://www.nrdc.org/food/files/wasted-food-ip.pdf
40 percent of food in the United States today goes uneaten. This not only means that Americans are throwing out the equivalent of $165 billion each year, but also that the uneaten food ends up rotting in landfills as the single largest component of U.S. municipal solid waste where it accounts for a large portion of U.S. methane emissions. Reducing food losses by just 15 percent would be enough food to feed more than 25 million Americans every year at a time when one in six Americans lack a secure supply of food to their tables.
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Member since: Wed Mar 3, 2010, 05:25 PMNumber of posts: 6,436
